Psychic Ills

Heavy on the psych and Eastern influences, Dins is spacier and more fully-realised than a good number of the other psych-folk albums being produced. Psychic Ills have replaced the tribal chanting and drums with quiet, mumbled vocals and spaced-out guitars. There’s the feeling that this isn’t so much a pow wow as a blissed-out jam session. There’s little urgency in these tracks, the album feels timeless and effortless; it could play continuously for days and you’d never know. What’s refreshing about Dins is the variety of the instruments and influences. It opens with tabla drums and a distinctive sitar sound (appropriately it’s titled "East”), which eventually descends into laidback chaos, incorporating a harmonica somewhere in its descent. The almost entirely instrumental "I Knew My Name” spends the first four minutes leading up to the vocals, which come on in full indecipherable mumbling. The entire album is so drenched in reverb and droning boundlessness that it’s difficult not to be reminded of early ’90s shoegazing. There’s a definite feeling that Dins is revisiting the glory days of the drug-induced, eight-minute droning rock song (see Sonic Youth’s "Diamond Sea” and the Velvet Underground’s "The Ocean”), which is exactly what happens on the final track "Another Day Another Night,” a sprawling, reverb-drenched epic that pulls layered vocals over paired-down guitars and the distinct high-pitch of a xylophone, culminating in a final, perfectly pitched strum.